In last week’s issue of the New Statesman, John Bew called for a planning revolution. As the Iran war goes on, we certainly need a more security-focused government. But he says also that the “hard truths” involved include cutting health, welfare and pension spending, tighter border controls and rethinking energy policy. Talking to friends in politics, I see little chance of Labour’s MPs allowing this. Indeed, very much the opposite: after the Gorton and Denton by-election, the wind blows hard from the left.
Bew wants a big intellectual drive, analogous to the 1977 “Stepping Stones” report ahead of the Thatcher revolution: this is exactly the kind of ambition you’d expect from the New Statesman. But if it’s to be underpinned by realism about the decline of the West, it is going to sound like a declaration of war inside the Labour family. Perhaps that is now unavoidable.
Predictive text
I roundly mocked predictions last week. So here are two more. The Iran war will produce a new cost-of-living upheaval… which the right-wing media will somehow manage to pin on Rachel Reeves. It will also eventually produce a sharp increase in cross-Channel migration, including by Islamists, which will demand an even tougher border policy, which will, in turn, provoke a further Labour split (see above).
Glasgow neglected
I’ve been thinking a lot about Glasgow (city of my birth) after the catastrophic fire next to Central Station, started by a dirty little vape shop. It’s an all too frequent story in the city: Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic School of Art has been devastated by fire not once but twice in the past 12 years; there was the Pollokshields tenement fire at Albert Cross in 2019; the Victoria’s nightclub fire in Sauchiehall Street a year before that…
Bad luck? But this almost annual loss-by-inferno seems symbolic. The “Dear Green Place” is one of Britain’s greatest Victorian cities but outsiders simply don’t care about it enough. From the City Chambers to the Spanish-Gothic Kelvingrove art gallery, from the still-shuttered People’s Palace to the spiky, spooky Necropolis and the raving churches of Alexander “Greek” Thomson – a genius and one of the first proponents of sustainable architecture – Glasgow is littered with astonishment.
Is it because of memory of the foul tenements, pulled down for tower blocks after the war, or just a lack of money, that this great city isn’t as appreciated as it should be? In Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark, the narrator argues that unlike London or Paris, Glasgow has not been properly commemorated by artists and writers, so it doesn’t exist fully imaginatively. Gray gave his life in part to remedy the lack. So, in that spirit, I recommend a new oil painting by Peter Brown – “Pete the Street” – who has just done the aftermath of the recent fire as a print for sale. His depiction is moving and fine. Take a look online.
No flies in me
I’ve just booked tickets to get up to Inverness in May, on the way to the West Highlands for a long weekend with my sisters. I should beat the midges, which tend to arrive later in the month and then hang around until autumn. If you haven’t experienced clouds of hungry female midges, hanging in your eyebrows, eyelashes, nose hair, ears and scalp, then you haven’t experienced the exquisite horror of which the natural world is capable.
Revenge is a perfectly natural response, and I’ve heard much semi-comic discussion about the possibility of a “midge-burger” – along the lines of the Kunga cakes of squashed flies eaten with apparent satisfaction around Lake Malawi. Count me out. I did eat grasshoppers in Mexico, fried on tacos. I would say they tasted… very insecty. The guy who sold them was eloquent about this environmentally friendly food source and said running after them with nets brought vital cash for farmers, particularly women. Was this the future, I asked him? No, he replied sadly – but in the meantime, “we have the fittest grandmothers in the world”.
The sauce of his power
I much enjoyed Ailbhe Rea’s profile of John Healey last week. “I discover that Healey carries a bottle of HP Sauce with him everywhere” is, of course, a loaded political statement. Harold Wilson was so addicted to HP Sauce, and it was such a national joke, that it was known in the Sixties as “Wilson’s gravy”. Mary Wilson once suggested that, actually, he preferred Worcester sauce. Whether this, like his pipe, was a populist gesture (he preferred cigars) I do not know. But Labour folk wondering where Healey’s real instincts are, and speculating on his ambition, may have picked up a message.
Speaking of Labour history, Neil Kinnock has been in touch to protest about me giving Dennis Skinner the credit for the anti-Jenkins “rancour” joke in last week’s column. He says it was Dickson Mabon, the Glasgow butcher’s son who became a prominent figure on the right of the party. I stand, as so often, corrected.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer is struggling to keep his New Year’s resolution]
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This article appears in the 18 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new world war
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentI live in Glasgow after many years in London, and it is depressing to see how poorly maintained this fine city is now. Dirty streets, buildings swathed in scaffolding for years, negligent owners, weed-choked parks, and witless graffiti on every possible surface. Once you leave London and the South-East, you realise how squalid, run-down and poor so much of Great Britain has become over the last two decades. I see no sign yet that the current government has got any grip on the continuing economic decline of this country.
As a native of Edinburgh, one might expect me to harbour an indigenous distrust of Glasgow or perhaps sympathise with the tired clichés regarding its neglect. On the contrary, living now on the West Coast and frequently travelling into the city, I find it nothing short of magnificent. To call Glasgow “neglected” is to miss the vibrant, breathing reality of what the City Fathers have transformed it into, with the Glasgow people themselves leading the charge.
Historically, long before Edinburgh claimed the title, Glasgow reigned as the true “Athens of the North.” It still sports majestic, neoclassical grid-iron streets which are architecturally magnificent and demonstrate the historic, staggering wealth of the Tobacco Lords from an era when it was arguably the richest city in Europe.
The city centre has blossomed into a premier pedestrianised haven. Along the “Style Mile” and through the sun-dappled lanes of the Merchant City exists a bustling, cosmopolitan energy that rival capitals would envy. The air here is thick with the pleasant aroma of artisan street food, blending comfortably with the background hum of conversation and that world-famous Glaswegian “patter.”
Unlike the decay of cities where shopping has moved out of town, Glasgow’s heart continues to beat strong. There is no shortage of quality shops of every persuasion; and serving this, its culinary scene is a delightful cacophony of tucked-away bars and family-run bistros where the slogan “People Make Glasgow” is not merely a marketing tool, but a lived, daily reality.
Nope—I don’t agree with the out-of-date and stigmatised description of Glasgow that some are so keen to portray.